Carrie Pilby

by Caren Lissner

  I felt miserable.

  I wondered: When am I going to be the one whom someone steals a chair for? Will I always be the donor of the chair?

  I still wonder this, today.

  I can’t possibly be the only one in this city who feels like this, can I?

  Everyone has to start somewhere. There must be people who move to New York and know no one. How do they meet people? Or maybe everyone else knows the secret to making new friends. They must have learned it in one of those grades I skipped.

  Maybe I’m just not doing this enough, going out. Maybe Petrov’s right. Maybe I have to keep forcing myself to attend social events for practice, which I hardly ever did in college. Okay, so this party attracted all Yuppie types, but perhaps the next one will bring out people who are shy and alone like me. I can’t give up this easily. There will be more parties, more events. And all it takes is striking up a conversation with one friendly person who might lead to more.

  But the very thought of doing this again makes my blood freeze.

  Why does the idea of going to more of these events scare me? It has nothing to do with my moral issues. I do find a lot of people morally weak, but that’s not the reason I have trouble meeting them in the first place.

  Maybe I fear going to parties because it’s risky.

  That’s it, isn’t it? I have no advantage in these situations. In school, teachers liked me. I always felt the most comfortable in the presence of adults. They found me smart. They got to know me through the work I was assigned. All I had to do was sit home at a desk and work hard on my homework to gain their affection. I had control over it.

  Maybe that’s why I act like grades and test scores are so important. They were. They help me make progress.

  Now no one cares. In a bar or at a mixer, I am just me. And no one gets to know me unless they talk to me. And I don’t know how to make that happen.

  Maybe I should start listening to Petrov. He has ideas.

  I don’t have to admit to him that his ideas are right. I just have to use them in my own life.

  It’s so hard to push myself, though. And what if my worst fears are true—what if I’m never able to connect with anyone?

  But then, sitting on the frozen fire escape, a buoyancy overtakes me. Because I think of something.

  I did talk to the guy by the bathroom.

  So okay, he had a girlfriend, and it turned out to be humiliating. But I am capable of talking to strangers.

  I will do that more. I will talk to people. It’s got to work out sooner or later.

  I stand up. It’s cold out. I look around for Cy. He seemed like a nice guy—with a certain sweetness rather than speciousness. He’s not out on his fire escape tonight. But I have a feeling I will see him eventually.

  There’s no rhyme or reason to this belief, but I’ve still got it. I guess if you don’t do drugs, and you don’t gorge yourself constantly, and you’re not in love, the one thing that’s left is hope. Hope that something more is out there. If you don’t have hope, that’s when the antidepressants come in.

  That night, I get a call from Matt and we make a date for dinner the next night. I’m excited as heck. I want to dance around the room. But why? I can’t have a relationship with him. Obviously, it would be wrong. I am taking his attention away from Shauna, on whom he should be focusing it.

  I should do what I said I would in the first place—find Shauna and tell her what Matt’s doing. Or at the very least, I should meet with Matt again just to tell him off. But I admit that I like him a little. I had a good time with him. Why should I be the one to give up a good time? Nobody else does. Why should it be my responsibility to change people like him?

  Maybe I should cheat. Shauna is the lucky one. She won’t ever have to go to a party and stand in the corner contemplating her ATM receipt. She won’t ever have psychologists writing up lists of ways for her to socialize. She won’t sit home alone on Thanksgiving because her family only consists of one person, and that person’s in Luxembourg. Because she happened to go to the right high school, she has a normal life. All of the pieces fell into place. She won the great vacation, the new car and the fabulous prizes. I have nothing. I can’t help it. I was good for nineteen years and it didn’t work out. Sorry.

  That’s stupid, though. I have at least ten years before I have to worry about these things. Why am I giving up already? Because the most normal guy who was in the Beacon personal ads is engaged.

  Well, I will figure out the right thing to do. I have a little time, I guess.

  Just to see if there’s an alternative to Matt, I pull out the phone numbers for Michael and Adam, the guys who answered my personal ad, again. I call both of them, but neither is home. This time, I leave messages on their answering machines.

  Around eleven that night, I get a call to do legal proofreading at a firm I’ve never been to. Because it’s late, they send me a car. At the firm, they put me and an older woman at a table in the middle of a silent, well-heated law library. For two hours, we stare across the table at each other and listen to the distant hum of some refrigerator or copy machine. I do a twenty-minute assignment and they send us both home.

  In the back of another hired car, at two in the morning, I gaze up at the lights on in the apartments. Again, I am part of the small and secret community of people who are up at this hour. I don’t see the actual people, though, just their lights. Some of the windows have potted plants on their sills; some have tiny gates; some have decorations or cleaning products; but they all have the same silent somnolent glow.

  I think that this is a beautiful world. You just have to find the small things in it to love.

  Matt looks nervous as he comes into Pellerico’s at seven. He doesn’t see me waiting at a table. He stands at the front, near the register, then looks at himself in the metal panel on the wall and pushes his hair back. Suddenly he notices me. He looks sheepish.

  After we both get our menus, he says to me, “I know I don’t drink, but are you sure you don’t want anything?”

  “I guess I could go for a glass of wine,” I say.

  “White wine,” he says to the waiter and I can tell he actually knows less about alcohol than I do, which is definitely strange. “So,” he says. “How was work today?”

  “Kind of slow.” He doesn’t know how true that is.

  “No one making mistakes?” Matt smiles. “Is that considered bad for you, when no one makes mistakes? Do you get nervous?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “It’s terrible to admit, but I do feel happy when I catch a mistake. If there aren’t any, I get nervous that I’m doing a bad proofreading job.”

  “I hear ya,” he says. I hate it when people say, “I hear ya.” They only say it if they have zip to add, or when they didn’t get a joke. Then, Matt begins pronouncing the dishes on the menu to himself. How irritating. Maybe it’s best that I don’t have a boyfriend. How can you stand to spend so much time with another person when everyone has so many little things that drive you crazy? Maybe I have less tolerance than other people.

  “What’re you getting?” Matt asks me.

  I hate when people base their order on what the other person’s getting. “What are you getting?”

  “You first.”

  “You.”

  “You.”

  “You.”

  “You.”

  “You.”

  He puts his hands over his ears and says, “You you you you you!” and I laugh, and I like him again.

  The waiter appears. “Need more time?”

  “No, he’s ready,” I say. “Go ahead, darling.” I smile at him sweetly.

  “Ah, you go,” he says. “I insist.”

  “I’m going to decide after him,” I say.

  Matt sighs, beaten. “I’ll have the…peenie a la vodka. Is it real strong vodka?”

  Oh brother. One of the nice things growing up with a traveling father did for me was enable me to eat out a lot. Matt apparently missed all of that.

/>   “You can’t taste it much,” the waiter says. “It’s in the sauce.”

  “Fine.”

  “I’ll have the portobello-mozzarella sandwich,” I say.

  “Mooosssarel,” Matt says, imitating me.

  “I can’t help if I can pronounce Italian,” I say, as the waiter leaves. “And it’s not peenie, it’s penne.”

  “Guess my mind’s in the gutter,” Matt says.

  “Maybe that’s where it should be,” I say.

  “At least, in about an hour,” he says.

  I’m kind of frozen. His eyes are gleaming. The waiter brings us a basket of bread, and we both reach for it. I think we’re nervous, because we go through a loaf and a half before our meals arrive. We also use up two little white porcelain cups of a spread that’s not quite butter but not quite cream cheese.

  “Would you like another glass of wine?” the waiter asks me, as he sets down our dinners.

  “Yes, sure,” I say.

  “I’m practically full already,” Matt says, looking at his plate.

  “I’ll help.”

  “You’ll eat my peenie for me?”

  “You should drink,” I say. “Then you’d have an excuse to say dumb things like that.”

  “I don’t need an excuse,” he says, and he reaches under the table and squeezes my knee. I look around to see if anyone notices, but all of them are busy with their own discussions or lustful thoughts or whatever they’re doing.

  Then I realize something. I just told him he should drink. There’s something wrong with me. I’m becoming the peer pressurer instead of the conscientious objector. I am doing, at nineteen, just what everyone else at college did when they were nineteen. Maybe my problem all along was just that I hadn’t gotten to the age at which I became a moron yet. Maybe at twelve, you develop breasts, at thirteen, you get your period, and at nineteen, your mind turns to mush and doesn’t recover until you’re thirty-one. That can’t be. I am right. I mean, I was right. Before I came to dinner tonight. I miss the old me. I can’t betray the old me. No one else was good to her. She must stay true and defy the corrupting forces all around. But why do I have to be the only one in this world who suffers? Being the old me hasn’t gotten me anywhere. The only exciting times I’ve had in the past three years have been doing risky things: with my professor, with Kara, and now Matt. Yes, I do like safe activities like reading and looking through the dictionary and philosophizing and sleeping. Especially sleeping. But Matt is interesting. Am I going to give up spending time with him? He’s not even married yet. This is not a departure from anything.

  I will drink some more and stick with Matt right now because, for one thing, I owe it to myself to be with someone like him whom I feel happy with. The fact that he’s not married means this isn’t really so bad—Shauna probably doesn’t appreciate him at all, and probably thinks it’s easy to get a boyfriend and that people like me who don’t have one are losers, and for another thing, if he does deserve for her to find out, then I should hang around him long enough to carry this plan to its completion. Maybe I can tip her off anonymously.

  When I finish my wine, a waiter sets a new glass on the table. Its clear meniscus seesaws, then settles. I see the dwindling twilight from outside reflect in it. Matt fills his fork with his penne, but some of it falls off. “I’m an incompetent pasta eater,” he says.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “I’ll bet you’re really good at other things.” He raises and lowers his eyebrows.

  The two of us work through our meals silently. I like portobello mushrooms and I like mozzarella, but I don’t think they complement each other, so I push them off the soggy sandwich and eat them separately. Matt looks as if he wants to question this, but he doesn’t. He was too full to eat a second ago, but now he’s packing it away. What an appetite.

  As if he’s reading my thoughts, he looks up and smiles, then resumes eating.

  Maybe after he’s spent enough time with me, he’ll leave Shauna. But am I just as stupid as any woman who believes this? Is it a trap we all fall into? If he wanted to leave her, he would have done it a long time ago. He really has met lots of people, I’m sure. But they were people who wouldn’t have accepted just being his hobby. That’s the only reason I got him. The only reason I met him. It was under the condition that I’d never be first.

  Forget it. I deserve fun. In the name of greater good, once again.

  “Dessert?” Matt says, a mischievous grin on his face.

  “You were full a little while ago,” I say. Half his entree is left.

  “We could split.”

  I look down the menu, then ask him, “Do you like tiramisu?”

  He shrugs. “I’ve heard of it, but what is it?”

  “It’s like wet, rummy cake.”

  “Wet is good.”

  I guess he thinks he’s being charming. We order it, and they bring it out, swimming in a white creme sauce dotted with flecks of chocolate. There are two long, thin spoons on the side. They get an A for appearance.

  Matt takes his spoon, poises it above the soft beige square and slices off a spongy corner. “Hey,” he says. “This is good.”

  “See?” Wow. I’m actually the one with more experience, for a change.

  “I must say,” Matt says, “first vodka, now rum. I think you’re corrupting me.”

  “I’m usually the one to be corrupted,” I say. “I’m pretty innocent.”

  “Are you, now?”

  “Yes.”

  I feel a little wobbly. But ebullient, too.

  Matt finishes his side and bangs the end of his spoon once on the table. “We did a good job here,” he says. “That’s teamwork.”

  When the bill comes, Matt fumbles with his credit card. He says, “Want to see my high-school yearbook, with all the dumb quotes?”

  As contrived as our whole meeting is, having come from the personal ads and all, he still has to think of an excuse to get me to come to his apartment. “Where’s your yearbook?”

  “Back at my place.”

  “Don’t you live with…”

  “Shauna,” Matt says. “She’s not coming home tonight. She’s in Jersey because her sister’s in a play.”

  So that’s it. The only reason Matt called me to meet him tonight was because he knew Shauna would be out of town; we got dessert because he can’t get it when he’s with Shauna; and last time, we ate Mexican because Shauna doesn’t like it. I’m just her understudy.

  Matt’s apartment building is brick and old. In the hallway, the air smells musty but the green carpet is clean, and the people living on the first floor have a fuzzy mat decorated with holly along with the word Joy. Matt leads me up the stairs to the second floor.

  The apartment is tasteful. The living room is black and white, with a coffee table, a full entertainment center (either a gift from someone’s parents or a sign that people in their twenties make way too much money) and pictures of Matt and Shauna together all over the place. Them at their prom, looking earnest and young; them at high-school graduation in their caps; them sitting on the beach in winter in hooded sweatshirts.

  I look at Shauna and think, You know exactly who you will be with on holidays. You will get him on his birthday and wake up next to him every morning and go to sleep next to him every night. You will dance with him on your 50th anniversary. When he becomes wealthy through his computer consulting company, you will beam at his side. You know all his secrets. You remember what he was like as a boy. You will have him your whole life, until you both die. Your whole life. That’s a long time. Should I begrudge them?

  “My yearbook’s in here,” Matt says, and I follow him into his room. There’s a double bed with a crocheted bedspread, a large TV and piles of books. Matt sits on his bed and opens the yearbook in his lap. The bed sinks. I sit down next to him. “Keep in mind I’m from Jersey,” he says. He points to different girls’ hair.

  “This one looks like a wig,” I say.

  “You think she’s bad, look here,”
he says, and turns the page. I laugh. Matt adds, “Look at her quote. ‘Don’t worry, be happy.’”

  I like the way his fingers move across the page, quickly yet deliberately.

  “It’s good that girl searched hard for something profound,” I say. Next he comes upon a girl who’s blond on one side and dark on the other. “Now, that’s interesting hair,” I say.

  “That was our salutatorian,” Matt says.

  “Come on.”

  “I told you,” he says. “It’s New Jersey.” He looks at me. “I really like your hair.”

  “It’s just hair,” I say.

  “It’s really natural,” he says. He takes a strand between his thumb and forefinger and winds it around them. “I like sleek hair.” Then he takes another. I lean closer. Pretty soon, we’re engaged in a fair amount of face-mashing.

  Eventually I look at one of the myriad pictures of Matt with the girl next door, this one poised precariously on top of his laser printer, and I sit up. “I should go,” I say.

  “Come on,” he says, lying on his back. “The night is young.”

  “Yeah, but I have to work tomorrow.”

  “So do I. So what? We won’t get many chances.”

  “Just because you’re on Shauna’s schedule doesn’t mean I am.”

  He sits up. “I know it’s not fair,” he says. “But you knew the rules going in. And you said you were in the same situation.”

  “Well, I broke up with my boyfriend. Because I knew that if I’m capable of having feelings for someone else, then I’m not where I should be.”

  Matt’s quiet for a second. “You’re young,” he says. “You’ll learn when you get older that it’s not so black-and-white.”

  “Well, maybe it should be.”

  “It’d be nice,” Matt says.

  “That’s bleak,” I say. “For you to give up on marriage.”

  “I’m not giving up on anything. That’s what this is all about.”

  The thing is, I don’t really want to leave. I want him to convince me to stay. I do like him, and I like exploring the idea of whether you can actually do something like this without hurting someone. Can it really be okay?